Hidden Collections Registry - Dev

Items

• The New Americans: Video Records of The Immigrant Experience

  The three-year project is a collaboration between Media Burn Archive and Kartemquin Films to digitize, catalog, and create online access to collection of 1,200 hours of documentary video footage of new immigrants from Dominican Republic, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Palestine, and Vietnam. The footage was shot between 1998 and 2003 by nine different filmmakers, providing a portrait of the immigration experience and American attitudes towards immigration in the period immediately prior to and following September 11, 2001. None of the content has ever been available to the public before. Creating public access will further in-depth scholarly research across many disciplines and fields, including history, political science, media studies, sociology, and global issues.

• Hiding in Plain Sight: Reviving the Work of Women Film Auteurs in the Digital Age

  USC’s Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity documents the under-representation of women directors in the Hollywood film industry, yet they are a strong presence among American independent filmmakers. Women film auteurs have been “hiding in plain sight” since the dawn of cinema, but scholarship & access lag, hindered by insufficient funds for collection, preservation & documentation. Using our 5K Kinetta Archival Scanner, IndieCollect will create state-of-the-art digital masters of 110 films by women directors, including 42 from Film-Makers’ Cooperative. After scanning & restoration, the original film and sound elements will be placed in permanent archive repositories; titles from Film-Makers’ Cooperative will be returned to their vault; and the new digital preservation masters will be placed at the Library of Congress. Time-coded digital versions and metadata for each film will be provided gratis to scholars affiliated with the Media Ecology Project.

• Unearthing a Half-Century of Archaeological Research in Indiana: Digitizing the Report of Investigations and Archaeological Report Series

  Ball State University’s Applied Anthropology Laboratories (BSU/AAL) executes a 24-month project digitizing over 50 years of archaeological research, making significant Indiana archaeological data accessible and searchable to professionals and publics for the first time. These hidden collections include project files for 18 Archaeological Reports and 102 Reports of Investigations (AR/ROIs) from 1965 to present. AR/ROI reports are scanned, digitized, and redacted, as necessary; representative artifacts from these projects are 3D scanned and photographed; key field notes and maps are digitized and uploaded into The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR). These AR/ROIs cover virtually all of Indiana’s long occupation history from the earliest (~11,500 B.C.) pre-contact Native American chronology, land-use behavior, religious and ritual practices through twentieth century farmsteads, military engagements, and historic Native American village/settlements. These difficult to access and underutilized collections contain valuable information for the public, Native American scholars, historians, and ethno-historians throughout the Midwest and the nation.

• Documenting the Evolution of a Great Outdoor Museum: The Plans and Images behind Building, Shaping, and Developing The Morton Arboretum

  This two-year project will enable the Sterling Morton Library of The Morton Arboretum to digitize over 7,000 plans, maps, and photographic images that document the creation and evolution of the Arboretum’s landscapes, buildings, and grounds since its founding in 1922. These materials will be made publicly available through ACORN, the Arboretum’s web-based collection management system; this platform supports scholarship and the creation of new knowledge by providing rich, meaningful context for the Library’s collections. CLIR funding would allow us to purchase large-format digitization equipment; hire staff to manage the project, digitize objects, curate online exhibitions, and create metadata / contextual materials; and identify and coordinate with scholars for a capstone event. The Arboretum's prominence as a long-standing regional institution, combined with the completeness of these collections in documenting the transformation of the Arboretum over time, makes this project a valuable resource for local historians, landscape architects, and land use planners.

• Digitizing 70 Years of Photography Education, 1930-2000

  The Archives, part of the ArtCenter Library, is seeking grant funds for an 18 month project to digitize and make available materials documenting professional photography education from 1930-2000. This period shows the trajectory of analog photography training and ends when digital photography largely replaced it. ArtCenter was one of the first schools in the United States to offer professional photography as a major. It had notable instructors, such as Ansel Adams, Fred Archer, Will Connell, and George Hoyningen-Huene. The materials in our collection consist of photographs and films documenting photo shoots in the studio and on field trips, students and faculty working in the darkroom, and catalogs outlining the photography curriculum. The collection is hidden in that finding aids and item-level records are unavailable online. In addition, most of the collection has not been digitized. Making this collection available online will help scholars of the subject, practitioners and educators.

• Images in Dialog: Digitizing the Voices of Photography Collection

  The Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona (UA) proposes a two-year project to digitize 875 videotapes made in myriad formats from 1975-2015. The collection comprises recordings of interviews, lectures, symposia, workshops, and gallery walk-throughs with artists, photographers, curators, gallery directors, and educators in the field of photography, as well as a diverse group of thinkers from other disciplines. These recordings represent a unique record of a dynamic period in the history of photography marked by growth, innovation, and the medium’s increasing influence within a broader cultural context. Once digitized, summaries and metadata will be created about each video. Scholars, students, and members of the public will be able to access the collection via a website created for the project with points of entry for those interested in the photography world and those more broadly interested in general arts and culture topics, identity, politics, place, and science.

• Hanford Site Manhattan Project and Cold War Era Artifacts 3D Digital Repository

  This two-year project proposes to digitize and make available in 3D format approximately 2,750 artifacts pertaining to the Plutonium processing facilities at Hanford (WA) from the beginning of the Manhattan Project in 1943 and running through the end of the Cold War in 1989. Roughly 2,500 of those nominated come from the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Hanford Collection while an additional ~250 come from the B Reactor Museum Association (BRMA), a revered community partner responsible for saving B Reactor from demolition. Creating a 3D archive of these unique and irreplaceable artifacts will foster research in three important ways: 1) it will minimize physical handling of items; 2) it will provide researchers with detailed descriptive information; and 3) it will provide access to long-sequestered materials to scholars around the world who might not otherwise be able to view them.

• Architectural Research Slide Collection, Phase 1 Digitization

  The Architectural Research Department of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation will digitize its nationally significant collection of 50,000 slides and 200 4”x5” transparencies of American buildings, sites, and objects dating from the seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth century, all taken by staff members over a 45-year period between 1959 and 2004. Descriptive metadata for each image will be provided from state-of-the-art research and dating methods and will be made available through a Creative Commons Public Domain Declaration. Once prepared, these images, previously unavailable to the public, will be placed online in Shared Shelf Commons, the freely accessible digital image archive developed by Artstor, where they will be available to a wide range of users at full resolution and no cost. This project will make newly available the research of a generation of scholars who helped redefine the scope and purpose of architectural fieldwork.

• Foreign Affairs Oral History Program: Digitization for Improved Access

  The goal of the Digitization for Improved Access project is to transform a unique, invaluable archive of over 2000 interviews from United States Foreign Service Officers and other foreign affairs officials since WWII into an easily accessible research tool for today’s and tomorrow’s scholars, students, journalists, practitioners and interested public. The archives detail the conduct of American diplomacy in over 170 countries. The collection offers rare insights into the formulation and implementation of US foreign policy and the role of the State Department, White House and Congress in this process. The two year project will: 1. establish a framework for managing existing and future content so that all interviews can be accessed in a free, online, full-text searchable archive on the organization’s website, 2.complete the process of digitization by indexing and cataloging the existing collection, and 3. lay the basis for improved on-line access by the user community.

• The Papers of Anna Roosevelt Cowles, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, and Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt

  The papers of Theodore Roosevelt’s sisters, Anna Roosevelt Cowles and Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, and of his wife, Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt, are housed at Harvard College Library. These collections have received considerably less attention than those of the male representatives of the family. Through this two-year project and with Harvard’s cooperation, the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University will digitize, describe, and provide online access to 36 linear feet of material from these collections, including letters, diaries, speeches, scrapbooks, and other items. The documents will become part of the TRC’s Digital Library, which already contains more than 43,000 items from 26 repositories related to Roosevelt, his family, his presidency, and his legacy. Enhancing the existing collection with the newly digitized women’s papers will provide new insight into Theodore Roosevelt, while illustrating the power of the Roosevelt women in their own right.

• Beyond The Well of Loneliness: Creating a Digital LGBTQ Collection from the Radclyffe Hall and Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge Papers at the Harry Ransom Center

  The Center proposes a twenty-month project to digitize its holdings of the papers of British literary figures and partners Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943) and Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge (1887-1963). Drafts of Hall’s controversial 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness – considered a groundbreaking work in lesbian literature – are accompanied by Hall’s notebooks, manuscripts, correspondence, contracts, photographs, and scrapbooks, plus 131 diaries kept by Troubridge from 1930 to 1951 and other materials. The Center plans to digitize 38,400 images and make them available as an online digital archive on multiple platforms, including DPLA; enable FancyBox viewing of the images from within the finding aid; and utilize IIIF, Mirador viewer, and Canvas to allow sharing, side-by-side comparison of literary drafts, annotations, and foster teaching with online resources. The project will provide worldwide access for scholars, educators, students, and interested communities to a highly significant LGBTQ resource remarkable for its content and comprehensiveness.

• The Emperor of West Texas: Digitizing the Amon G. Carter Papers

  In this one-year project, Texas Christian University’s Mary Couts Burnett Library (TCU) and the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries (UTA) will digitize and provide metadata for 34.5 linear feet of papers and 15,000 negatives documenting the life and career of Texas businessman Amon G. Carter. Carter (1879-1955) was born into poverty and left school at 11. From this hardscrabble beginning, Carter grew to publish the largest newspaper in Texas; play a major role in the nascent airline industry; lure major manufacturing to Fort Worth, Texas; and host everyone from humorist Will Rogers to President Dwight Eisenhower. Combined, the collections at TCU and UTA reveal a deep wellspring of Carter’s business and personal accomplishments and of his single-handed efforts to shape the national and world perception of Texas in the early twentieth century. Digitized materials will be available and searchable online through a jointly managed web portal.

• Great Explorations: Unlocking the Complete Visual History of the Ryan Aeronautical Company, Maker of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, An Airline, Flight School, and Aircraft Manufacturer

  San Diego Air & Space Museum (SDASM) is home to the corporate records of Ryan Aeronautical, one of the nation’s most influential early aerospace companies. Ryan developed many significant aircraft during its history, several far ahead of their time. The Museum’s collection documents the company’s entire history. Although work has begun to catalog, index, preserve, and digitize portions of this important collection, rare Ryan film negatives remain inaccessible, and not available for research. The Museum requests a two-year $212,640 CLIR grant to catalog and digitize 80,000 of these one-of-a-kind Ryan Aeronautical film negatives. Negatives digitized through this grant will be made available and accessed through the Museum’s website and Flickr account, reaching a wide public audience. Digitized records will be maintained in the Museum’s digital asset management system. Metadata will be created and further crowdsourcing will allow SDASM to enhance its records through public comments made on Flickr.

• Photography and Audiovisual Digitization: Stabilization, Quality Control, Image Correction

  Following an inventory review in 2017, the New Museum has prioritized digitization of its collection of archival photography and audiovisual materials, currently in a fragile state and/or facing format obsolescence, for the next major initiative for its digital archive. The two part project will include stabilization, quality control, image correction, as well as ingest and curation phases.

• The Bass Digital Archives Initiative (BDAI) for the Digitization of the Institutional, Cultural, and Artistic Holdings of the Bass Museum of Art and Expansion of Miami Beach’s Cultural Heritage and Preservation

  To create a digital repository of the institutional archives of The Bass Museum of Art (The Bass) in Miami Beach, Florida. Since 1963 when the museum opened its doors to the public, photographs, works on paper, architectural papers, institutional documents about the museum’s history, and the personal papers of the founders John and Johanna Bass were safely stored in the former Miami Beach Public Library and Art Center. The Bass museum building undergoes a rehabilitation plan since 2015. The museum’s archives are also being rehoused, thus this is the right moment to begin digitization and make the archives fully available to the public. The BDAI will create a free and open to all digital repository, with a collection of approximately 35,000 images in two years, as part of Florida International University’s Digital Collections, dPanther.

• Coming in from the Cold: Digitizing Hidden and At Risk Northern, Polar, and Indigenous Collections from and about Circumpolar Regions in Alaska and Canada

  This 36-month project led by the Alaska Library Network will enhance accessibility to and discoverability of important northern and Arctic primary source materials not well known to the public. Participating institutions include University of Alaska, University of Alberta Libraries, Manitoba Archives, Yukon Archives, Northwest Territories Archives, Massachusetts Historical Society, Providence Public Library, American Museum of Natural History, and Presbyterian Historical Society. The “hidden collections” these institutions hold are often from remote and inaccessible locations for which widescale digitization would provide far greater access to many more people on a topic of crucial importance. A long-term goal of this Coming in from the Cold initiative is the virtual integration and combination of these collections online, which will provide unique circumpolar scholarship opportunities as well as broaden understanding of the cultures of the local indigenous communities documented within these wide-ranging historical and cultural materials.

• Hamlets, Houses, and Highways: Digitizing the Built Environment

  Over the course of two years, UK Libraries will digitize the Kentucky Heritage Council (KHC) Kentucky Historic Resource Inventory. Started in 1966, the KHC has conducted an ongoing survey of historic sites in all 120 Kentucky counties. The inventory serves as a permanent written and photographic record of all known historic buildings, structures, and sites in the commonwealth. In partnership with the KHC, UK Libraries will make 100,000 surveys and associated metadata available in an online database. Kentucky’s historic places dot the landscape from Appalachia in the east to the Purchase region in the west, encompassing river towns and railroad towns, historic neighborhoods, courthouse squares, African-American hamlets, Native American villages, coal mining camps and roadside architecture – urban and rural landscapes that define our sense of place and tell the story of who we are as Americans. Online access to the surveys will increase research opportunities across numerous disciplines.

• Emily Harvey Gallery Archive – 1982-2004; Performance Art/ Fluxus/ Concept Art/ Mail Art

  The digitization of the Emily Harvey Gallery (EHG) archive will make available online rare ephemera, correspondence, photographs, videos, and audio files documenting the experimental art activities fostered by Emily Harvey between 1982 and 2004, starting with the Grommet Gallery (1982-84) and extending until the end of the EHG. The archive—housed in the same building that functioned as the haven of experimental activities and that is now the site of the Emily Harvey Foundation—features key examples of Performance Art, Fluxus, Concept Art, and Mail Art, and captures the unique developments of these practices through the 1980s and 90s. Supplementing major archive holdings such as The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection and the Getty Fluxus collection, the rare documents in the EHG archive provide historical insight into a lesser-known phase of the New York downtown art scene in the decades following the birth of these radical practices.

• Discovering Dance in Human History: The Choreometrics-Cord Films from the Alan Lomax Performance Style and Culture Research Collection

  The Association for Cultural Equity will digitize and provide access to filmed resources on traditional dance and movement. Folklorist Alan Lomax and colleagues compiled the films as part of their groundbreaking research on expressive performance styles. The Cord Collection films were selected to represent traditional dance performances from all continents in research on dance in comparative perspective with a method called Choreometrics. The Cord Collection is a subcollection of film within the Alan Lomax Collection at the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center. The digitized media will be disseminated in an open access web resource, the Global Jukebox. The American Folklife Center will assist with the processing and digitization of the film by an external vendor. A consultant with extensive experience in digital humanities and data management design for dance studies will assist with database design and user experience for the dance resources to be created by the project.

• The Ark Legacy Project: Fostering Open Digital Access To Live Sound Recordings of Americana Musical Performances, 1968-1980

  The University of Michigan will digitize, preserve, and make available for research and teaching the most at-risk half (1968-1980) of a unique collection of live performances at The Ark in Ann Arbor, one of the oldest and most respected Americana music venues in the United States. The 325 recorded weekly events (1,137 hours) form an extensive, nearly continuous 13 year sequence of performances. The two-year project, built on a successful pilot, will: (1) create preservation quality digital copies of fragile magnetic reel-to-reel tape recordings (plus standards-compliant technical and descriptive metadata); (2) deploy a streaming access system with robust copyright management capabilities; and (3) engage performers represented in the recordings to document the content and register permission to release their performances under Creative Commons licenses. This project constitutes a new management model for collections of recorded sound, where intellectual control challenges exist and the danger of loss is high.

• Ludwig von Mises Historic Archive at Grove City College

  Grove City College, a small liberal arts college located in northwestern Pennsylvania, owns an archive of 20,000 pages of unpublished works by Ludwig von Mises. Mises was a leading 20th century Austrian economist and the mentor of Dr. Hans Sennholz, a long-time Chair of the College's economics department. The historically significant collection covers Mises’ life in Europe during the rise of the Nazi party and the start of WWII to his emigration to the United States up until his death in 1973. Most of the papers cover his political and economic beliefs. The College’s archive team will digitize the collection and make it available via an online web portal located on www.gcc.edu. Scholars from around the world will be able to access the collection and the College will create linkages with other organizations to publicize the collection.

• Digitizing Apalachee: Apalachee-Spanish Mission Archaeology Document Collection

  Archaeologists with the Department of Anthropology at Florida State University have investigated 17th-18th century Apalachee-Spanish Missions of La Florida since 1950, including sites located in the Florida panhandle, St. Augustine, and coastal Georgia. However, the documents associated with these investigations of Apalachee-Spanish Mission period sites are not widely available. Over 24 months we will digitize and organize the collections into a database hosted by FSU to: enable a global network of scholars and students to have easier and long-term access to the information held in these documents; making copies suitable for exhibits, publications, and web use; and for researcher requests. This free and publicly accessible resource, excepting data with sensitive site location and/or cultural information, will enrich studies in Anthropology, Native American studies, American history, Florida history, studies of the Spanish Empire in the Atlantic World, amongst others.

• Preserving music concerts before they fade away

  Opened in 1975, the Rice University Shepherd School of Music has become one of the most prominent music schools in the country. Faculty and alumni include Pulitzer Prize and Grammy winners, and musicians who have performed at Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera, and other world class performing venues. Thousands of performances by Rice faculty and students have been recorded and collected in multiple formats, with accompanying programs and other documentation. Many of these recordings --- particularly those made on reel-to-reel tape---are on the verge of being lost to media deterioration or technology obsolescence. Our primary goal is to convert these recordings to digital format through the NEDCC. We will preserve these newly digitized audio files through existing digital library preservation strategies and create descriptive metadata for them, ultimately making access versions of these performances available online at the university’s institutional repository so that the public may freely listen to them.

• Preserving History, Kent Blossom Music Festival, 1981-1983

  The Kent/Blossom Music Festival is an advanced training institute for professional music training operated by Kent State University in conjunction with The Cleveland Orchestra and Blossom Music Center in Northeast Ohio, presenting public performances by distinguished artist faculty and talented young musicians. The program began in 1968, and has acted as a launchpad for many professional musicians, including current members of The Cleveland Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic along with the Emerson, Miami, Borromeo, Ariana, Grancino, Euclid and Miro Quartets and many other well-known international performers. The project included in this proposal will focus on ninety seven reels from the Kent Blossom Music Festival recordings, addressing specifically a portion of the audio reels with Sticky Shed syndrome from the collection.

• Voices of the Don Bolles Bombing Investigation

  In 1976, Don Bolles, an investigative journalist for The Arizona Republic, died after a bomb exploded beneath his car in central Phoenix. Many, including Bolles himself, believe that organized criminals were behind the hit. Bolles’s murder has become an infamous mark in Arizona history—a watershed moment which spurred the law officers, politicians and the courts into reform. On a national scale, its notoriety called attention to the dangers of Investigative Journalism and solidified its importance. Forty years later, the bombing is still shrouded in mystery and controversy. The Arizona State Archives is requesting funding to digitize a small portion of tapes from the Bolles Collection that we believe contain valuable information such as police interviews and wiretaps of the case’s most important figures. Their digitization will expand access and provide new information about the criminal activity that spanned many levels of Arizona society during the late twentieth century.